Franne Davids (1950 - 2022): Paintings by riccomaresca

FRANNE DAVIDS

Franne Davids

Franne Davids (1950–2022)

Introduction by Alejandra Russi

Essays by Abigail Frankfurt and Adam Hanft

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Franne Davids (1950–2022): Paintings at Ricco/Maresca Gallery: November 1–December 7, 2024, concurrently with a solo booth at The Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA): October 29–November 2, 2024.

Published by Ricco/Maresca Gallery

529 West 20th Street | 3rd Floor New York, NY 10011 riccomaresca.com

Artworks by Franne Davids © 2024 The Franne Davids Estate “A Lush Fantasy World” © 2024 Alejandra Russi “Guided by Voices” © 2024 Abigail Frankfurt “And Suddenly There’s Franne: An Outsider of Great Significance Leaves Her Personal Airspace and Enters Ours” © 2024 Adam Hanft

Photography by Jurate Veceraite

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Project manager: Alejandra Russi

Editor, designer, and production manager: Laura Lindgren

Printing and binding: Puritan, New Hampshire

Typeset in Hercules and Campton Printed on Accent Opaque 100lb.

Front cover: detail, page 81; frontispiece detail, p. 32; p. 5 detail, p. 71; p. 6 Franne Davids going to school, 1961; p. 9 detail, p. 47; p. 10 Franne Davids, Rosh Hashana, 1961; p. 13 detail, p. 47; p. 14 Franne David in silly hat, n.d.; p. 23, detail p. 41; back cover, detail p. 27

ISBN: 979-8-9859205-3-6

A LUSH FANTASY WORLD

ALEJANDRA RUSSI

Frances Beth Davids, known as Franne to those close to her, was born in Connecticut on December 17,1950. The eldest of two children in the prototypical American Jewish family, she was the teenage girl with the bouffant sixties’ haircut and wearing a swing dress. By then Franne had discovered the gift of art within her, and she intended to allow it to flourish. Little did she know that the seed of mental illness would eventually consume her entire life, eradicating any prospect of an art career in the public eye, but blossoming into an extensive oeuvre that developed in isolation.

After graduating from high school in 1968, Franne endeavored to get a college education, attending several institutions for brief periods that were punctuated by psychotic breaks. By the late 1970s she was formally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had to move back to her parents’ house in Waterbury, Connecticut, where she lived for the rest of her life, and where she died in 2022.

Thrust into the self-fulfilling prophesy of the “outsider” artist, Franne fell headfirst into the black hole of her mental illness. Her reality was fractured and a lush fantasy world, rendered in paint, was born. The basement of the house became her studio and haven, and she was left alone to wander the mysterious trails of her nonconforming brain. “There was no struggle for sanity going on here,” says her sister-in-law Francine; “she could be as crazy . . . as she could be.”

Modern psychopharmacology, which began the year of Franne’s birth with the synthesis of chlorpromazine, was still in its infancy and shrouded in stigma at the time of her diagnosis. For most of her life she was on and off treatment and medication, mostly off by her own choosing. Her writings— journal entries, letters never sent, and prose poems—reveal a stream of consciousness that was sometimes lucid; oftentimes disjointed and impenetrable. The nature of her hallucinations was unclear to her family, who believe they were mostly auditory: “The ladies in her paintings are definitely part of that,” says Francine. “She would talk to them; she had relationships with them.”

Between her mid-twenties and early middle age, Franne occasionally ventured to New York City alone, disappearing for days. She would go to MoMA, where she believed her art was on display, returning angry with the certainty that the museum had “stolen” her paintings. In late adulthood, Franne’s forays into the city were few and far between; she withdrew further from the world and immersed herself in art making, spending most of every day in her basement studio, but none of her work ever saw the light of day.

A number of 35mm color slides document some of her paintings that no longer exist, evidence that Franne reworked and overpainted many of her works—likely several times. The surface of her canvases and works on paper is so thick with

paint that it still carries the aroma of oil. Family members were allowed few occasional glimpses into Franne’s basement studio, but they remember that, especially in her later years, she would sit for long periods of time pondering over her work.

Franne’s paintings almost always revolve around a specific cast of characters, groups of women very closely gathered in flattened interiors. In work after work, she insists on the same general scenario and motifs: a personal folklore rendered in dense patterning and vibrant palettes; even objects pulsate with mysterious exuberance. We know that Franne lived in an animistic universe: she believed a broken refrigerator could heal itself, and that there was a voice inside a smoke detector that belonged to an elf. We also know that she held onto a childlike wonder: fairytales and chivalric romance occupied an important place in her personal library, and she delighted in watching vintage animation and Disney cartoon films.

Raw yet refined, and thoroughly her own, Franne’s paintings evoke a playful cross section of visual affinities, from Madge Gill’s ethereal female faces and Aloïse Corbaz’s voluptuous horror vacui to the dreamlike theatricality of Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse’s still lifes, and even William Hawkins’s fearless

figurative abstraction and bold use of color. In the last ten years of her life, it is likely she produced only small works, a percentage of which seem to be self-portraits.

In 2013 Franne’s mother, Sonya, passed away. She had been the person most responsible for seeing that her daughter remained cradled in her fantasy cocoon. Franne continued to live in the Waterbury house and at one point started wearing Sonya’s clothes, as in senior age they had both come to weigh some 300 pounds. In 2019 Franne was diagnosed with cancer that after a period of remission spread to her lungs and brain. During her final hospitalization, she repeatedly asked her brother Noah and sister-in-law Francine to make sure her purse was kept safe. Only after she passed away did they open this “old, falling apart” thing and discover it was jammed with every identification card that Franne ever owned, including her grammar school ID.

It took the family more than a year to clear out the contents of the house; many decades of “neat hoarding,” as Noah describes it. When it came to Franne’s work they were overwhelmed: 42 large, heavy paintings on canvas and some 550 works on paper. “We didn’t know what to do with her art,” says Francine. “We certainly didn’t want to put it in the dumpster.”

GUIDED BY VOICES

ABIGAIL FRANKFURT

“Have you been worrying a lot?” She says, yes, she has. I ask her why, and she says it’s because she stopped taking her medication. “Why did you stop taking your medication?” She says that the only reason she stopped is because she was visited by the archangel Gabriel. And then she was also visited by the archangel Michael . . . “I’m lonely. I miss them. I want them to come back.”

People who have auditory hallucinations are apt to put an earplug in the right or left ear to quiet the voices. Those who struggle with anxiety with such ferocity recommend listening to Audible. It quiets the mind and settles the body into sleep. Each individual who rides the subway would be driven mad if they didn’t find a coping skill, be it music, The New York Times, TikTok. The word “sane” is on a sliding scale and people with mental illness walk among us with minds racing or sit on benches in lethargy. It is a gift to have an illness that has offered you respite; your sickness coexists with a regulator—at least it seems it was that way for Franne. She painted layer upon layer of women, girls, friends—in the basement of her family’s home in Connecticut. Having had some schooling, Franne had innate artistic ability and a mind that made her a virtual recluse. Her paintings are thick, bubbling in places—vibrant colors—girls playing the piano for an audience of reclining, angelic women. Girls at large dinner tables—their faces bare

no expression—eyebrows are thick lines of oil paint—eyes look like buttons, both nose and mouth are straight lines—and they almost always are staring at the onlooker: Franne. Why shouldn’t she have company in the basement in Connecticut alone? Every great creative secretly yearns for an audience. A woman in a layered dress plays the piano, her fingers elongated. The blouses on the figures are detailed with dots and swirls, and the colors bring you into a world that is flooded with what one wants rather than what one gets.

When she was a girl the voices were friendly. She thought everybody heard voices. She didn’t know that other people didn’t.

There is no vitriol in Franne’s art—only an invitation to an alternate reality that transcends the barrier between childhood and being an adult. Labyrinths start and stop in, perhaps, unintentional patterns—as if she went upstairs to have dinner and returned to a painting with the thought undone. And isn’t that what a labyrinth is: passages in which one has difficulty finding a way out. I can’t help but think of the anxiety of being trapped—in thought, in delusion, in a mental illness that tells the host this is not an illness, this is salvation. To Franne she and her illness were twin souls. As the years went on, thoughts passed between them in paint; a gesture translates an artist to the society she is trying to interpret. And if she had been

removed from the basement and committed to an institution, we would have never been witness to her interpretation—for institutions can be cruel—taking away a painter’s brush, a writer’s pen and exchanging them for little white cups overflowing with medication—dulling your mind and imagination— making you pliable to doctors and stethoscopes.

Patient oriented to time, place, self. But continues to ruminate about radio messages being sent through her braces.

When I look at Franne’s paintings, the oil so thick it makes me restless—the girls and women with white, expressionless faces, bows in their hair, dresses from her dreamlife. I think of the comfort she must have gotten out of the motion of her paintbrush sweeping the canvas, creating comrades who quieted her mind. The piece I have been writing is not so much fact based (quotes, dates, place). I suppose it reads like someone looking at the collection. Walking through a gallery of Franne with Franne—as if she is whispering in my ear. Telling me of the freedom that art offers the mentally ill. Her lengthy conversations with the images. She created a world to find comfort in because of how painful mental illness can be. I love the girls, their eyebrows, the simplicity of their faces—all the trouble and excess seemingly stripped away. It is like looking at a dinner plate and secretly drawing eyes, nose, and mouth on it. The layers of oil paint remind me of the tar bubbles dripping down a telephone pole that kids used to pop on the walk home from school.

Patient remains highly paranoid, fears government is poisoning him through hospital food.

The only experience I can bring to Franne’s artwork is my own. I do not know what the basement she painted in looked

like—was it damp or dry? Knowing she stopped taking her medication because it hijacked her body and her mind. The world looks at this behavior and calls it sick, but schizophrenia is as subjective as art. I feel Franne . . . her sweaty, clammy hands gripping a paintbrush, pushing out brilliantly colored oils against a canvas—with which to say: “I am here”—“I don’t want to be here”—“I am still here.”

Patient slept. Patient slept. Patient slept.

No one forfeits a life of ease for one of suffering, and all suffering is torturously lonely—it isolates the patient—it wants to take your beauty down—yet all the while it is creating the beauty. Franne painted girls—nonjudgmental, beautifully adorned girls—of which she was one. As much as they appear to be a covenant, taunting even the sharpest eye, chanting: “Don’t you wish you were here, with us, deep, deep inside the layers, camouflaged from your world, safe and loved in bubbling color!” Sometimes when I look at Franne’s girls, I wish I could join them. I wish the world looked at mental illness with dead eyes and flat faces. I wonder how each of us makes it alone, with pills rather than a paintbrush. Franne saved herself. The loud colors, the labyrinths, the patterns that repeat and hide while they dry . . . over and over and over again—an unkind mind has no friend—you are the host who is searching for solace. It seems to me Franne found a way to quiet her disease.

When you know all of those things exist for other people but not for you, sometimes it’s very hard to endure the not having.

AND SUDDENLY THERE’S FRANNE

AN OUTSIDER OF GREAT SIGNIFICANCE LEAVES HER PERSONAL AIRSPACE AND ENTERS OURS

ADAM HANFT

Is contextualization, inevitably, an act of bias?

Plunging any entity into an historical slipstream—whether it’s a political coup, a new architectural form, or an artist saved from the dumpster by some combination of fate, sentiment, and appreciation—is an exercise in the forward migration of existing frameworks.

Those frameworks are never neutral. Applying the immediate present to the categorizer’s active—or inactive—memory is subject to the biases that defined the original menu of opinions. If I don’t like Rosetti and the pre-Raphaelites, as a critic it will be hard for me to objectively contextualize a twenty-first-century artist whose work fits—regrettably for said artist—into that genre.

This reminds me of that. That reminds me of this. Which in turns reminds me of a third thing, which unstoppably leads to a fourth. Predispositions and oft-stated positions are ineluctably summoned forth, requiring a rustling of fresh perspective.

I must point out, and quickly, that there’s nothing fundamentally problematic when existing perspectives are intuitively or mechanistically applied to the apprehension of something new and different. These imprints, these determinates of fixity, actually can help identify that which is truly new and different from the repackaged familiar.

Contextualization is thus a necessary act of bias that must be handled with caution. It’s a complex tension between compartmentalization and the intrinsic value—and emotional enlargement—that comes from connecting the most recent to the most enduring componentry of your personal experiences.

Without the ability to contextualize, we would in essence be aphasically and amnesically adrift in a world whose raw newness would overwhelm our processing powers. Which is why babies cry.

It’s not like we haven’t tried to abandon the force field of isms. A decontextualized aesthetic model was de rigueur in the middle of the twentieth century. It was called the New Criticism—a formalistic approach to cat skinning, which argued that literature must be viewed independently of the stork that brought it. It reached a moment of fashionable intensity but is largely irrelevant now other than to academic theorists, as cultural shifts and social justice movements have made it impossible to separate environment, nature, and nurture from output.

Nonetheless, our inability to eradicate a personal history of seeing—and the neural substrates that codify it—creates the risk of criticism that is vulnerable to—if not victimized by—pattern recognition biases: the availability heuristic, the confirmation bias, the law of the instrument.

The last museum or gallery show you saw, or your specific academic training—or your aversion to pre-Raphaelite sentimentality—all fill your mental filing cabinet and could wind up trashing the worthy, the deserving.

Contextualization, for these reasons, is also a form of conceptual violence. When we see a work of art for the first time, we naturally rip it out of its temporal habitation and jam it into a new neighborhood. That rupture can be insensitive—a showoff-y display of learning, but it’s not all bad. The aesthetic construction of macro-connectomes, as in the legendary 1984–85 MoMA show “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” can be light shedding in dual directions. These complexities and limitations are not limited to the casual museumgoer, but they profoundly impact the critic, because we are all pattern-seeking missiles. They challenge me as someone who was asked to put the recently discovered body of Franne Davids’s work into a broader context.

Nor are you immune, dear reader, from having the immediate freshness of what something is being toxified by the accumulative archive of what it reminds you of.

This is essentially the same conversation, in a different way, as to the role of judgment in criticism. When a new writer or artist or filmmaker is put “in the company of,” opinions are bestowed—which of course is the day job of any critic. But forced companioning is often a lazy shortcut for both writer and reader.

THE PRIVATE CHAMBERS

All of which brings us around, somewhat belatedly but I hope valuably, to Franne Davids. (Henceforth I will stick with her first name; Davids lacks the semantic force of distinction.) Fighting bias, I spent a lot of time with the work in a clean

mental state before deciding I could move from absorption to description.

That included stepping into the river of Franne’s life. I could very well have written this piece without reading the wonderful biographical essay in this volume that Alejandra Russi wrote; or without going through the transcript of Ale’s interview with Frannie’s brother, sister-in-law, and nephew; or without spending time with her work in the neighborly company of Aloïse Corbaz, Madge Gill, Janet Sobol, and others. But it would have suffered the same deracinated and solipsistic failures as the New Criticism.

New discoveries cry out for contextualizing, and depriving the critic or observer of that perspective—and the benefits that accrue—may enhance the cognitive biases of disclosure, but surely elevates those discoveries to a more emotionally accessible plane.

I took that risk on my behalf, and by extension yours. By reading this you join me in accepting the curse of knowledge for the enlightenment it carries with it. And of course Franne is a moving target: as John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” 1

What is Franne’s work about, what is she trying to tell us? Where does she fit, contextually, in the panorama of outsider art and beyond? And how do we experience looking at something that is at once so new and simultaneously so inchoately connected—yet indifferent to—what came before?

I will be fortunate if I deliver to you some hints, because Berger is right.

What we know is that Franne Davids always drew and painted; that she went to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; that after she left college she lived for a time in the

Akron area; that she made the pilgrimage to Paris and came back to New York and studied very briefly at the Art Students League of New York.

We also know that, as her brother put it, “She valued her art.” He recalls that at twenty-three she entered a painting into a competition, denoting it as Not For Sale and putting what seems a cheeky $5,000 insurance valuation on it.

Sometime after she returned from Paris to the States, she began to “go off the rails,” as her brother declared, and was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. She moved back to her family home in Connecticut and would travel to New York City and visit museums—her family isn’t clear on what else went on, although they pointed out that she was attractive and was the recipient of a lot of attention. At home, in the basement, with very little natural light, she spent the next decades working and reworking her paintings and producing the works on paper that appear in this show for the first time.

Franne was not without immediate inspiration; beyond her museum going, art books about Picasso, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others were on her shelves. I wonder if the nineteeth- century architect and designer Owen Jones also crossed into her life via the remarkable book Jones published in 1856, The Grammar of Ornament . 2 Franne seems to have transmogrified Jones’s formality into her own noun and verb order.

Which brings us to the first-order question of contextualization: does that level of engagement with art eliminate her from outsider status?

This is an ongoing ruction, which of course can never be settled. The addition of Franne into the conversation makes it all the more layered but inevitably unsatisfying.

A purity test is aesthetic cyanide.

NON-NORMATIVE, NONPAREIL

My view is that Franne’s obsessive interest in art—which includes outsized ambition—is not an outsider disqualifier, but rather an impulse that can live in happy complementarity to indisputable outsiders like Martín Ramírez or Adolf Wölfli, or a contemporary master like George Widener, who is untrained but in full possession of his economic faculties. In fact, Franne’s mature work was created after her brain went haywire, which is true of all the great schizophrenic outsiders. She surely wasn’t paralyzed by Harold Bloom’s famous “anxiety of influence”; Franne is neither running to nor escaping from predecessor imprints. Her art is its own cosmos. Her incessant reworking and overpainting is characteristic of many outsiders, a form of OCD.

I am also of the belief, after having perused a body of academic literature that investigates what schizophrenia does to memory and to physical perception, that Franne’s exposure to art does not detract from the unmediated character of her work. The disease has profound consequences on both.

Three quotes shine a light on the hypothesis that whatever training and exposure Franne had was wiped clean, or interrupted, in the whisk of a neurochemical Etch A Sketch, leaving only a palimpsest of the sources and allowing a true outsider imagination to emerge from the ambiguity.

“The present meta-analysis indicates memory impairment in schizophrenia to be wide ranging and consistent across task variables.” 3

“Subjects with schizophrenia exhibited impaired performance relative to controls for object and spatial visual perceptual discrimination.”4

“These [findings] recognize the importance of perceptual dysfunction in schizophrenia.” 5

So, shall we move beyond the navel-gazing of “is she or isn’t she” to the art in question?

My first-responder response: The scale of the paintings knocks you out. Many outsiders worked in cramped aesthetic quarters, mirroring their limits of cognition or movement, but Franne is expansive in space and tone.

Her paintings are all figurative, although you could argue that the richly decorative and textured backgrounds and interstices are active participants in the experience. The women who populate them—call them Franne’s Sisterhood—are elaborately garbed and in some cases elaborately coiffed. They lived together in Franne’s imagination, but they feel emotionally disconnected from each other, each—like Franne—in their own constructed worlds.

Franne’s subjects seem all dressed up for the occasion, almost formally posing for a camera. Perhaps it is a memory from her Waterbury childhood, when photography was expensive—a studied moment. Note as well the cinematic draping at the top of the frames, which adds to the performative projection.

And, oh, the dresses! Across Franne’s full body of work, they are extravagantly vibrant and explosively colored—no, saturated—with deep reds, blues, purples, and an occasional mustard yellow, a sunflower pop, as seen in the work on page 27. The brushwork is bold and confident, forming strong lines neighboring on vaguely pointillist dot patterns that together convey a sense of swooshy movement.

Indeed, such is the movement that the motifs pour into the background, as if they cannot contain their visual energy. In

the work on page 25, a biomorphic series of distorted concentric circles races from dress to the spaces between the figures, organized and vaguely mandala-like. One is tempted to wonder if this is a visual statement of how schizophrenic thinking yokes foregrounds and backgrounds, reflecting the breaks in spatial perspective that characterize the disorder.

In some cases, the women’s dresses are rendered with color blocks and repetitive patterns (see page 39)—but the garment in the work on page 25 looks beaded and embroidered. Franne paints fabrics with a love and abandon; I can’t think of another outsider so obsessed with textiles and their expressive potential. Her work hints at a middle-European vernacular (the Ukrainian artist Janet Sobel comes to mind). You could name many of Franne’s paintings “Hungarian Women on Their Way to a Wedding.”

The dresses, it can be argued, are the subjects of the painting.

They are enveloping; they allow for no flesh to be exposed. Franne’s family reported that her mother was adamantly aggressive about eliminating suggestiveness or sexual innuendo from her life.

Later, Franne reached some 300 pounds, and we don’t know exactly how these paintings correspond with her weight gain, but it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the clothes are a coverup (more on this, later). That urgency to hide is true even in paintings such as on pages 39 and 81, where the figures are less discernable, not as tightly contained as others, more abstracted and formless, as if Franne’s hold on reality is similarly drifting.

The net effect is a fully imagined but nonetheless tiny and proud world populated by what I have called her Sisterhood. We mustn’t forget that Franne grew up in the midst of the feminist

revolution, that she was a fiercely independent woman with a mission to be an artist, until mental illness brought her down. Her women are both expressive—they speak volubly through their colors—and domesticated, as was Franne herself; unlike many outsider artists, she lived in her childhood home, where her mother took care of her for most of her life. James Castle comes to mind as another house-trapped outsider, but Franne’s work—exuberant, colorful, with no saddening claustrophobia— could not be more different to Castle’s.

The faces, though, lack the communicative charge: they are a different kettle of fish. Across the paintings, for the most part, Franne’s faces are only indicatively realized—often with snowman-like eyes—a striking contrast to the attention given to the rest of the canvas. In the work on page 57 the faces are more detailed and emotionally available, but this one’s an outlier. What’s more, in some cases there are Halloween-masklike faces. I see Edvard Munchian scream-shaped faces as well.

Later in her life, Franne worked on a smaller scale and created around a hundred of what Frank Maresca believes are selfportraits (their oil paint was still slightly wet when he gained access to them). They are pointedly powerful, but in a different way than the large works, reflecting more psychological insight. The faces are more emotive, with expressions ranging from perturbation to quizzicality, mild disgust, semi-flirtation, and vacancy.

We don’t know why Franne moved from canvas to paper— perhaps her access to canvases was limited. Or perhaps she became emotionally, if not physically, exhausted by the effort to fill the expanse with her personal torrent of meaning. One wonders if she might have become more acutely aware of her own mood jolts and bolts and wanted to capture those realities.

THE FORMALISTIC FIT

As for the question of existential contextualization, Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964) is the first to claim her place. The linearity is clear; Corbaz is a pantheonic outsider who became romantically obsessed with the German Kaiser Wilhem II, in whose court she labored as a teacher and governess. World War I brought her back to Switzerland, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the remainder of her life in a mental institution, working through fantasies of passion unrequited.

There are obvious similarities between Franne and Aloïse: their subjects are females; the use of color is gutsy; the figures are placed forthrightly and own their space; eyeballs are rarely shown; with the absence of the multilayered gaze that a trained artist can communicate there is repetitive iconography and a dense interlocking of stone-shaped, natural forms.

But there is also a cleaving distinction. Corbaz’s work expresses fearless sensuality and romance—her women are never fully clothed, and they show off their sexuality and passion with pride. In Franne’s work the flesh and a concomitant sense of romantic longing are never to be seen. Her dresses diligently hide the bodies they clothe, with an almost religious—or at least, Freudian—fervor.

Aloïse Corbaz’s training as an opera singer may be the source of an overwrought, histrionic sense of drama in her artwork. By contrast, Franne’s work is bold but not as theatrical, more modest even in its optical flamboyance.

In an essay for Outsider Art Fair, Charles Russell wrote that Corbaz did not engage in much conversation when she was introduced to Jean Dubuffet (who shouldn’t have exactly expected profound repartee). Dubuffet, Russell writes, “speculated that she was not mad; rather, she found a space within

her ‘madness’ to establish a selfhood where she could create her remarkable visual universe independent of the cultural world.” 6

That observation is an early ray of insight that arrows straight to Franne. Both artists organized the chaos of their lives, trying to make sense of the madness of their interior existence, as opposed to normalized artists who try to make sense of the madness of the world. The exteriority versus interiority dialectic is core to a Linnaean sortation of Outsiderdom.

It is doubtful that Franne came across Aloïse Corbaz’s work, or that of Madge Gill, who might be called another aesthetic doppelgänger, disconnected but assimilative. Thinking of Franne’s work in tidy proximity to these masters, C. G. Jung naturally comes to mind. Jung wrote that the collective unconscious “appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images” and that these universally shared memories make art “a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him.” 7

While this is certainly not the case for savvy constructors like Jeff Koons—I am sure he has not surrendered an ounce of free will—it predates Dubuffet’s notion of the outsider. Jung’s mediumistic qualities apply perfectly to Madge Gill. Her oeuvre, hundreds of drawings of women’s faces, is predictive of Franne—at first. But upon closer inspection, Gill’s faces are more intensely wrought, more detailed, nuanced, and expressive. We don’t know if the women in Franne’s paintings are the same person continually re-represented, but we do know that Gill’s women look similar but have individual identities. In fact, Roger Cardinal reported, “She once confided to a cherished friend, the journalist called Louise Morgan, that every face she drew had significance.” 8

Also, as Cardinal points out in his biography of the artist, Gill’s “frenetic improvisations have an almost hallucinatory quality, each surface being filled with checkerboard patterns that suggest giddy, quasi-architectural spaces.” 9 Franne did not build her world with the kind of linear, structural rigidity and tight lines that Gill deployed. Her work is far wilder and more feral, though compositionally rigorous.

Another artist who comfortably sits alongside Franne is Janet Sobel. An outsider who started painting as a grandmother, she not only worked in drip but invented it. Peggy Guggenheim included her work in a 1945 show.

In addition to her drip paintings, though, Sobel also worked in a figurative mode, and her portraits of extravagantly wardrobed women painted with minimal facial expressions, sometimes masklike, sometimes vaguely Cubist, often abandoning background for full-on painterly density, are notable. They share harmonic notes with and of Franne. Although Sobel exhibits more intentionality about quoting the artists that influenced her, sometimes those quotations might be more unconscious than intentional, given that her women are wearing clothing evocative of her Ukrainian heritage.

There is a fascinating Sobel to Chagall to Franne nexus here. Sobel met Chagall in his studio in New York after he escaped the Nazis. Some of Franne’s works have a distinctly Chagallian quality; the woman on the left in the work on page 47 evokes some of his early paintings and delivers an interrogative punch, a frisson of animating energy. Growing up in a Jewish household, Franne is more likely than not to have seen Chagall’s imagery, and it left its mark on her.

Franne could also have wandered into Sobel’s work, although by the time Franne started painting, Sobel was erased by male critics who, in the words of Sandra Zalman, a professor

of art history, viewed her as a “housewife” whose work did not fit into any high-art categories in the 1940s, and was viewed as “primitive.” 10

One remaining contextual node, strange as it seems (but Franne is nothing if not that) is Gustav Klimt. His 1902 Portrait of Emilie Flöge is all high-art, acutely intense and revealing portraiture, and the Vienna Secession is as far away from a basement in Waterbury, Connecticut, as you can get. But his textures and patterns—elegant, shimmering, repetitive with flaunty dazzle—are uncanny auguries of Franne’s iconography. I was struck by a description of Emilie Flöge as a “bejeweled icon, a gilded beauty whose decorative trappings constitute a metaphorical chastity belt.” 11 The body-hiding narrative continues.

Klimt also drew on Islamic forms and Byzantine mosaics, whose echoes appear in Franne’s shapes and visual delectations. Such contextualizations enrich her work and our experience with it, but there is a satiation point. One becomes calorically overwhelmed and a shot of curatorial Ozempic is in order to arrest the appetite for more.

Which is why I am not even bringing up Vincent van Gogh, despite correspondences in color, texture, and at times delicate patterning.

I have no doubt that Franne’s febrile, peripatetic brain took in all the museum greats—she sought their recognition—and then out everything came. And when it did, it emerged pure and resolute, one thing and one thing only, no forebears jockeying for attention. Franne is creatively autonomous.

Yes, there are contemporary artists—forward contextualization—who represent relevant visual lineage. Yayoi Kusama’s patterning. Cecily Brown’s vortex background dramatics. Matthew Wong’s chillingly gorgeous, juxtapositional surfaces.

But these are mainly interesting if you want to reify Jung, if you want to consider how our primal wiring, our neural substations, appear in shockingly consistent ways.

They are also noteworthy, though, as a moving demonstration of how universal pain can be in its presentation. Schizophrenia or trauma: the agony repeats. In a blog devoted to displaced people in Myanmar’s Kachin State, I found images created by young students who are “exorcising their psychological demons” through artworks, some of which are visually akin to the ghostly figures in some of Franne’s works.12

THE JOY OF EX

There is a lot going on when a singular new, external imagination like Franne’s hits your brain. An appreciative mission is launched. You rapidly absorb the work through a matryoshka model of unfolding references and apprehensions to find a new light that shines simultaneously backward and forward.

Discovering newness in the work of a writer or a performer or a composer is different than with visual art. The former are linear experiences that the brain processes as the stimuli are sequentially received.

Visual art hits you all at once. It’s more like food—and sometimes it takes a while to get your bearings. Being lost in that way is a creative experience on its own. A discovery like Franne is like finding a new continent or at least a new landmass.

Like a true outsider, Franne sacrifices the observer. She has abandoned any interest in the viewer; what she is trying to communicate is entirely one-directional. There may be a narrative in her head, but it isn’t clearly manifest from painting to painting, if it is there at all. Franne is not a world-builder in the way that artists such as Henry Darger, Corbaz, Achilles Rizzoli and James Edward Deeds were—constructing epic narratives

with recurring characters. Franne’s women leave us hanging, waiting for more. Which we will never get—beyond what we construct ourselves.

Having entered the cathedral of contextualization, Franne will be compared to artists past and emerging alike, and existing artists will gain plangency through Franne’s new, irrefutable presence. Berger’s “never settled” once again.

I look forward to that forever unsettling state: new acts of bias applied and overcome by the simultaneity of the unmolested response, and the considered reflex.

In truth, both are finally contextual because even if we approach a new artist as naked as we can be, we can never be fully unclothed.

NOTES

1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 1972), 7.

2. https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/owen-jones-and-the-grammar-of-ornament# slideshow=7716019588&slide=0.

3. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.156.9.1358.

4. C. Tek, J. Gold, T. Blaxton, C. Wilk, R. P. McMahon, and R. W. Buchanan. “Visual Perceptual and Working Memory Impairments in Schizophrenia,” Archives of General Psychiatry 59, no. 2 (February 2002):146–53. doi: 10.1001 /archpsyc.59.2.146. PMID: 11825136.

5. P. D. Butler, S. M. Silverstein, and S. C. Dakin. “Visual Perception and Its Impairment in Schizophrenia,” Biological Psychiatry 64, no.1 (July 1, 2008): 40–7. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.03.023. PMID: 18549875; PMCID: PMC2435292.

6. https://www.outsiderartfair.com/artists/aloise-corbaz.

7. C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull, vol. 15 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966). https://doi.org /10.1515/9781400850884.

8. Roger Cardinal, https://madgegill.com/biography.

9. Ibid.

10. Sandra Zalman, “Janet S obel: Primitive Modern and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” Woman’s Art Journal 36, no. 2 (2015): 20–29. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/26430653.

11. https://www.gustav-klimt.com/Portrait-of-Emilie-Floge.jsp.

12. https://www.artseverywhere.ca/cog-kachin/.

66 × 68 in. (167.6 × 172.7 cm)

54 × 651/2 in. (137.2 × 166.4 cm)

121/2 × 19 in. (31.8 × 48.3 cm)

81/2 × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm)

531/2 × 68 in. (135.9 × 172.7 cm)

18 × 233/4 in. (45.7 × 60.3 cm)

44 × 32 in. (111.8 × 81.3 cm)

121/2 × 19 in. (31.8 × 48.3 cm)

50 × 591/2 in. (127 × 151.1 cm)

491/4 × 551/2 in. (125.1 × 141 cm)

10 × 14 in. (25.4 × 35.6 cm)

11 × 151/2 in. (27.9 × 39.4 cm)

15 × 20 in. (38.1 × 50.8 cm)

48 × 60 in. (121.9 × 152.4 cm)

46 × 46 in. (116.8 × 116.8 cm)

11 × 151/2 in. (27.9 × 39.4 cm)

14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 27.9 cm)

23 × 26 in. (58.4 × 66 cm)

15 × 22 in. (38.1 × 55.9 cm)

15 × 221/4 in. (38.1 × 56.5 cm)

50 × 56 in. (127 × 142.2 cm)

15 × 20 in. (38.1 × 50.8 cm)

14 × 22 in. (35.6 × 55.9 cm)

81/2 × 111/4 in. (21.6 × 28.6 cm)

9 × 113/4 in. (22.9 × 29.8 cm)

46 × 50 in. (116.8 × 127 cm)

401/2 × 52 in. (102.9 × 132.1 cm)

111/4 × 15 in. (28.6 × 38.1 cm)

11 × 141/4 in. (27.9 × 36.2 cm)

121/2 × 19 in. (31.8 × 48.3 cm)

40 × 54 in. (101.6 × 137.2 cm)

411/2 × 551/2 in. (105.4 × 141 cm)

121/2 × 20 in. (31.8 × 50.8 cm)

451/2 × 721/2 in. (115.6 × 184.2 cm)

9 × 11 in. (22.9 × 27.9 cm)

103/4 × 15 in. (27.3 × 38.1 cm)

50 × 62 in. (127 × 157.5 cm)

11 × 141/4 in. (27.9 × 36.2 cm)

11 × 15 in. (27.9 × 38.1 cm)

14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 27.9 cm)

14 × 183/4 in. (35.6 × 47.6 cm)

All works by Franne Davids are untitled and ca. 1979–2018.

WORKS ON CANVAS PAGE

25 Oil on canvas

66 × 68 in. (167.6 × 172.7 cm)

27 Oil on canvas

54 × 651⁄2 in. (137.2 × 166.4 cm)

31 Oil on canvas

531⁄2 × 68 in. (135.9 × 172.7 cm)

35 Oil on canvas

44 × 32 in. (111.8 × 81.3 cm)

39 Oil on canvas

50 × 591⁄2 in. (127 × 151.1 cm)

41 Oil on canvas

49 1⁄4 × 551⁄2 in. (125.1 × 141 cm)

47 Oil on canvas

48 × 60 in. (121.9 × 152.4 cm)

49 Oil on canvas

46 × 46 in. (116.8 × 116.8 cm)

53 Oil on canvas

23 × 26 in. (58.4 × 66 cm)

57 Oil on canvas

× 56 in. (127 × 142.2 cm)

63 Oil on canvas 46 × 50 in. (116.8 × 127 cm)

65 Oil on canvas

× 52 in. (102.9 × 132.1 cm)

71 Oil on canvas

× 54 in. (101.6 × 137.2 cm)

73 Oil on canvas

× 551⁄2 in. (105.4 × 141 cm)

77 Oil on canvas

× 721⁄2 in. (115.6 × 184.2 cm)

81 Oil on canvas

× 62 in. (127 × 157.5 cm)

WORKS ON PAPER

28 Oil on paper

× 19 in. (31.8 × 48.3 cm)

29 Oil on paper

× 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm)

32 I nk and oil on paper

33 I nk and oil on paper

36 Oil on paper

× 19 in. (31.8 × 48.3 cm)

37 Oil on paper

42 Oil on paper

× 14 in. (25.4 × 35.6 cm)

43 Oil on paper 11 × 151⁄2 in. (27.9 × 39.4 cm)

44 Oil on paper 15 × 20 in. (38.1 × 50.8 cm)

45 Oil on paper 15 × 20 in. (38.1 × 50.8 cm)

50 Oil on paper 11 × 151⁄2 in. (27.9 × 39.4 cm)

51 Oil on paper 14 × 11 in. (35.6 × 27.9 cm)

54 Oil on paper

55 Oil on paper 15 × 221⁄4 in. (38.1 × 56.5 cm)

58 Oil on paper 15 × 20 in. (38.1 × 50.8 cm)

59 Oil on paper

× 22 in. (35.6 × 55.9 cm)

60 Oil on paper

67 Oil on paper

79 Oil on paper

68 Oil on paper

82 Oil on paper

69 Oil on paper

74 Oil on paper

61 Oil on paper

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introducing Franne Davids to the art world has been a collaborative journey, marked by both intention and serendipity. We are profoundly grateful to everyone who played a role in in this project.

Franne’s brother and sister-in-law, Noah and Francine Davids, have been exceptionally generous with their time and unwavering support, offering their insights and resources with remarkable kindness throughout our endeavors.

Jamie Frankfurt had the vision to recognize the significance of this body of work and the foresight to bring it to our attention.

Sam Orlofsky was one of the first to acknowledge the brilliance of Franne’s oeuvre and has been a steadfast advocate for her art.

Ricco/Maresca’s dynamic duo, Suzy Bucky and Jun de la Cruz, have been invaluable in managing the logistical complexities of handling an artist’s complete output and ensuring its meticulous conservation. Chloe Kohlhoss and Suy Kang, also from our team (present and past), invested significant time in editing raw photography and cataloguing Franne’s work.

Our essay contributors, Abigail Frankfurt and Adam Hanft, captured Franne’s creative spirit with emotional sensitivity and sharp intellectual acuity.

Franne Davids devoted her entire life to her art, and now it has taken on a life of its own.